Fayzulla Khodzhayev

Fayzulla Khodzhayev (1896-March 1938) was a Bukharan politician who served as the head of government of the Uzbek SSR from 1924 to 1925, preceding Vladimir Ivanov. He was executed during the Great Purge for being an alleged Uzbek nationalist.

Biography
Fayzulla Khodzhayev was born in Bukhara, Emirate of Bukhara in 1896 to a family of wealthy Uzbek traders, and he became involved with reformist Pan-Turkism in 1916. With his father's fortune, he helped in establishing the "Young Bukharans", and this group invited the Bolsheviks of the Tashkent Soviet to seize the Emirate of Bukhara by force in 1917. On 2 September 1920, the Red Army bombed and occupied Bukhara, ousting the Emir from power. That month, he became head of the Bukharan People's Soviet Republic, and he barely escaped assassination by Basmachi leader Enver Pasha during the Basmachi Revolt. In 1924, when the Bukharan PSR became the Uzbek SSR, Khodzhayev became the head of the Uzbek government. He opposed Joseph Stalin's heavy-handed control, particularly in the matter of cotton monoculture, and he was dismissed from all posts in 1937 after Stalin called him an "enemy of the state". On 13 March 1938, having been convicted of beeing a "Trotskyist" and "regimist", he was executed in Moscow.